


Magical Thinking

by Sixthlight



Series: Interstitial Spaces [1]
Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, During Lies Sleeping, F/M, Family Feels, Gen, Menstruation, Missing Scene, Spoilers for Lies Sleeping, cameos from the Usual Suspects
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-08
Updated: 2019-01-08
Packaged: 2019-10-06 15:14:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17347535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sixthlight/pseuds/Sixthlight
Summary: Beverley was in a lab when the Nightingale called.





	Magical Thinking

Beverley was in a lab when the Nightingale called. The only reason she saw it at all was that she was using her phone to time the current stage of the DNA extraction they were doing. You were supposed to use the clock really, not your phone, but of course the demonstrators weren’t bothering her about it. And the clock was right at the other end of the lab and a pain to see.

She felt a spike of unease, because she liked Nightingale well enough but it wasn’t like they were mates. There was one main reason he called her and that reason was Peter. And right now, Peter was –

She stripped off her gloves and answered the call. A demonstrator cleared their throat, but she waved a hand, and they went quiet. Mum would have her hide for that if she found out, or more likely Ty, but then she wasn’t thinking about Mum or Ty or anything except what Nightingale was saying, which was “Lesley’s taken Peter.”

Beverley drew in a sharp breath. She would find out later, from some of her classmates, that half the Eppendorf tubes in the lab had shaken themselves out of people’s hands and tube racks, spilling reagents on the bench and ground. In the moment she didn’t notice.

“She _what_?”

“He met with her in a pub, last night,” Nightingale said, his voice clipped, what Peter called his man-of-action tone. “Then he was pulled into a marked police vehicle. It wasn’t one of ours, and we don’t know who was driving. We haven’t located him yet. It’s been – it’s been twelve hours. I…take it he hasn’t contacted you.” 

“I’m coming over,” Beverley said, and walked right out of the lab, leaving her notes and bag and everything. Someone could get them later. She didn’t even remember she had her safety glasses on until she was out of the building.

She hadn’t driven to uni this morning and she didn’t have time to call anybody, so she found the nearest courier van – there was always one around, universities had deliveries all the time – and asked him to take her to Russell Square, giving it everything she had, all the inexorable power of her river and its tributaries and the people who did and didn’t know they worshipped it. Mum would have her hide for that too, maybe, but who cared.

There was nobody visible when she hopped out of the van at the Folly’s back gate. One of the analysts came out of the Annex and looked like she meant to ask what Beverley was doing, but Beverley marched right past her up to the back door. It opened in front of her, though the wards stayed resolutely up, as they always did. Why wasn’t Peter inside those wards, where he might be safe?

“Beverley,” Nightingale said, having opened the door to her. He didn’t have a hair out of place, as usual, and in that second she hated him for it.

“How could you let him just -” she started, panic erupting out, but he interrupted her, snapping sharply, entirely unlike his usual calm.

“You think I _let_ him?”

“You’re supposed to keep him safe!” Beverley yelled back.

“I know my duty,” Nightingale said, not yelling but so coldly Peter, if he was here, would be making a joke about the freezing temperatures of things that weren’t water. Peter wasn’t here. They stared at each other.

“I don’t suppose,” he said after a moment, quieter, “you would know – you would have any idea if -”

Beverley clenched her fists, knowing it wasn’t Nightingale she was angry at. “I keep telling Peter. It’s not, we’re not _wizards,_ we don’t have books and instructions and – if I knew,” she said, “if I knew don’t you think I’d be there and not here?”

“Damn it.” Beverley blinked at that. “I – I had hoped.”

He sagged, just a fraction, there in the doorway, nothing really changing but his suit suddenly somehow rumpled in a way it hadn’t been before. Hearing those words from the Nightingale made something turn over in her stomach, and the anger was still there, still so powerful she could feel her ears burn and her mouth go dry, but it was further away from this moment right here. It was for later.

“The only way I would know,” she said, “is if he was in a river, and Lesley isn’t stupid. You know she’s not. She – if she has him somewhere she won’t let there be so much as a puddle on the floor.”

“No,” Nightingale agreed. Beverley could see someone coming up behind him, but couldn’t unfocus enough to see who it was. “There’s – there’s some CCTV footage. Would you like to…I don’t know if…”

“Anything I can do.” She could feel her heart racing now, the anger distant enough that fear was creeping in. “You know that.”

He stepped out of the Folly, and took her to the coach house. She looked back and saw Molly in the doorway, her hands over her mouth. 

*

While they waited for the footage to load, Beverley looked around Peter’s tech cave. Everything echoed him, his Xbox and his TV and the couch where they’d lazily snogged half-a-dozen times, except Peter wasn’t here, and maybe he was nowhere, and –

“If she kills him I’m going to kill her,” she said, out of nowhere, testing the thought out loud.

“Peter wouldn’t like that,” Nightingale said, fingers tapping on the mouse like it would make the system work faster.

“There’s what you’d call a logical fallacy there.”

“Yes.” A window opened; he clicked on it, and something else started processing. Beverley waited for him to say something like _of course, I couldn’t allow that._ He didn’t.

“I’m going to stay here.” Beverley looked around again. “Until he – just in case – I’ll go and get my overnight bag, and I’ll come back, and…”

She felt somehow as if, if she committed to that course of action, it would make Peter walk in the door, like waiting for a watched pot to boil. Saying it would bring him back.

“No need,” Nightingale said. “I can have a constable go and get it, or you could call your – er, acolyte, I suppose, if you’d rather.”

“Oh.” Beverley blinked again; she hadn’t even thought of that. “Right, yeah, I’ll call Maksim. Of course.” Another thought, less pleasant, occurred. “Have you…has someone called his parents yet?”

“I didn’t want to worry them unnecessarily, when there’s nothing they can do. When I thought he still might – and then it was the middle of the night.” Nightingale shook his head. “But…on the other hand, I hate to think what Rose will say if she knew he’d been…and I hadn’t called.”

Beverley took a deep breath. On screen, the ‘play’ button had gone green. “Right. Right. I’m going to…I’m going to call Maksim, and you’re going to call Rose and Richard, and then I’m going to see if I see anything on the CCTV and you’re going to do your police stuff and –“ and then, maybe, Peter would walk in the door, summoned by their efforts, like one of those ritual spells he’d told her about.

“Yes, you’re right,” Nightingale said. “I’ll call them. It’s – I honestly thought he’d be back by now. That we’d have found…something.” He looked towards the door; he was thinking the same thing as Beverley was.

“You know what’s going to happen,” Beverley said. “We’re going to do all this, the song and dance, and then he’s – he’s going to show up with Chorley in handcuffs and, and leading Lesley by the hand all ready to switch sides again, and we’re all going to feel stupid for worrying.”

“No.” Beverley looked at Nightingale sharply, angry all over again that he wasn’t going to play the game, but he gave her the flicker of a smile. “No, it wouldn’t be here, if he had Chorley in handcuffs; he’d take him to the secure cells at Belgravia. But I feel as if you’d rather wait here.”

“Well, the food’s better, so I hear,” Beverley said, and he gave her a real smile at that, if a strained one, and she knew that he did know the game; that they were going to tell each other it was all right until it was.

She was a goddess. She knew all about believing in things until they were real.

“Go on, then,” she said. “Call them.”

Nightingale nodded, and stood. He put his hand on the back of her chair, as if to help himself stand, so close she could feel the warmth of it. Beverley leaned back for a fraction of a second, as if she was stretching, and that was all the comfort the Nightingale was going to take, and all she had to give right now, but it was going to be enough. It was going to have to be.

“I’ll tell them you’re helping,” he said. “I think that will reassure them.”

Beverley nodded, and waved him out.

Then she leaned forward, to the grainy video, and tried to see if there was anything she could learn that a dozen police analysts couldn’t, and listened all the while for the sound of Peter opening the door.

*

That first day, after the footage didn’t yield anything, she went out and asked questions of everybody she could think of, everybody who wouldn’t speak to the Nightingale but might speak to her. Nobody knew anything; nobody had seen anything. The second day, she yelled at people, until she found herself yelling at Zach Palmer while he cowered behind a lamppost in Putney and realised it was all bloody pointless. There was some minor, unseasonal flooding in Roehampton that evening, but Beverley wasn’t even sure if it was her, even though it was her river. Everything seemed muted, unreal. Peter couldn't just - vanish. Could he? 

Beverley got back to the Folly, went to change, and found the clothes Maksim had sent, which she hadn’t really looked at the day before, were her emergency clothes. When she called he said everything else was in the Clean But Not Sorted basket in her room – Peter flatly refused to sort her washing for her – and Maksim was weirdly squeamish about picking through something that might contain bras, as if he’d never seen one. He definitely hadn’t packed one, even though there were about fifteen pairs of underwear. She put on her last-ditch jeans and no bra and didn’t care.

The police weren’t finding anything either. Sahra Guleed sat with her for an hour and talked about all the leads they’d followed and all the leads that hadn’t panned out, which was all of them, and swore on her mother’s life that they’d find Peter, they would.

Beverley nodded, and told her not to make promises she couldn’t keep. Sahra said she never did. 

*

The third day she went and knelt in front of her mother and – not to put too fine a point on it – begged. They were alone, but she would have done it in front of every one of her sisters, if she'd had to. 

“If there was anything I could do,” her mother said, “I would do it. I know you have chosen him, and he is a good man.” She shook her head. “But this is not a thing within my power or yours. I know you know this.”

“It’s not fair,” Beverley said. She stood up.

“No,” said her mother. “It is not.” She stood herself; that almost never happened. “And I am sorry for it.”

Beverley’s throat burned, but for some reason she couldn’t cry.

*

The fourth day she went to class for lack of anything better to do and didn’t hear a single word anybody said. Melanie handed her the bag she’d left in the lab, when she’d walked out, and asked her if everything was alright.

Beverley thought about explaining, the awful weight of it, to someone who’d met Peter but didn’t _know_ him, and summoned up a smile instead.

“Yeah,” she said. “Just busy, river stuff, you know.”

Melanie didn’t look convinced, but she didn’t ask any other questions. That was good.

*

The fifth day she frowned and checked Clue on her phone and realised her period was two days late, which wasn’t totally out of the ordinary but she was usually pretty regular, and wondered if – they hadn’t been _trying_ trying but they hadn’t always used a condom, and she’d gone off the Pill at the start of the year.

Then she thought about having a child with Peter’s smile and Peter’s curiosity and no Peter, and it nearly choked her. She dove into the river and swam until her muscles burned and she’d thrown back rubbish at litterers from Twickenham to Canary Wharf, and when she got out there was still no word and Molly had left her dinner on the doorstep of the tech cave. She ate it without tasting it, and slept without dreams.

*

On the sixth day, Tyburn came to the Folly, which she hadn’t done since the time when Peter had been locked out, according to Peter. She wrinkled her nose at the remains of Beverley’s takeaways. Molly's cooking was good but sometimes you wanted something really terrible for you.

“Don’t,” Beverley said. “And don’t – don’t tell me I should have expected this one day anyway, or that he brought it on himself, or that – don’t tell me anything, I don’t even know why you’re here –"

Ty looked at her with an expression of extreme pity, and Beverley trailed off, wanting to find the magic words to convince her she was an adult and she was making the right decisions. She'd never known them and she thought she never would, not if she lived to be as old as the Old Man. 

“How are you doing?” Ty asked, gently, and Beverley’s shoulders stiffened. “How do you think?”

“Mum sent me,” she said, “but I wanted to come anyway.” She put a hand on Beverley’s shoulder. “I’m not here to tell you so, about anything. Just that we love you, and we’re here.” She squeezed. “And, although I know you won’t believe me, I hope as much as you do they find him alive. He’s a right royal pain, but I never didn’t like him. Only what I thought he wanted to do.”

“You didn’t like him for me.”

“Oh, that’s different. I wouldn’t like anybody for you – you’re my little sister.” Ty leaned in close. “But I’ll tell you a secret; you could do worse.”

She didn’t say anything when that made Beverley cry, just hugged her, which was maybe the nicest thing she’d ever done. Beverley hadn't wanted to cry yet. It felt too much like giving up. 

*

On the seventh day she woke up and found she’d bled messily right through her pants and onto Molly’s good white sheets, and at first she couldn’t remember why that was bad instead of just sodding annoying, and then she did, all at once. She cried snottily for ten minutes before she could bring herself to bundle the bedding up and take it to Molly. Thankfully there were tampons in her overnight bag, and Molly nodded when she explained, and patted her on the shoulder.

Nightingale came and found her that evening as she was staring at the air mattress, trying to decide if she cared enough to make it with the fresh sheets Molly had given her or not. Peter would have made it up with hospital corners. He wouldn’t care if she didn’t, though. He’d never tried to make her care about those things just because he did. As long as she picked up her underwear. She’d have to pick it up in here, before he came home.

Nightingale didn’t seem bothered by the presence of feminine underthings in his general vicinity, although he’d lived long enough he must have seen some at one point or another.

“Everything alright?” he asked. “There’s no news, I’m afraid.”

“I’m not pregnant,” Beverley said, not knowing she was going to say it until she did, and had the privilege of seeing the Nightingale openly surprised.

“I…is that to be commiserated or congratulated?”

“I don’t know,” Beverley said, her hands full of duvet, still kneeling and staring at the air mattress. “I wish I did.”

Nightingale stopped somewhere behind her. “Peter w- will be a good father, when the time is right for the two of you.”

“Of course he will be, or I wouldn’t be thinking about having a kid with him.” She twisted the duvet in her hands, then untwisted it, and tried not to think that Nightingale had almost said _would have_. “But if. If…do you know what really scares me?” She couldn’t look at him; she couldn’t believe she was saying this to him, except the Old Man and his sons were too old and her sisters and mother were too young and Nightingale might understand what she meant. “Forgetting. If you talk to Oxley or his brothers, they say they don’t remember things. From ages ago. What if I forget him? In a hundred years, or two hundred?” She turned to look up at Nightingale, and found that he’d sat down on the floor, a meter or two away, his arms held around his knees. She’d never seen him look so small.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve forgotten anything from when I was young. Or not beyond what Abdul and Jennifer and Peter assure me is normal, for childhood memories. But if anything about living beyond my years keeps me up at night, that does.”

“Well that’s reassuring,” Beverley said, giving up and throwing the bedding down.

“I try.” Nightingale shrugged. “But I also think…we live in a very different age from all the ones that have gone before it. There are people – my family had a camera when I was young; one of my sisters made a hobby of photography. And still, I have maybe half a dozen photographs of all of us. If I had been born at the same time as you or Peter, there would be dozens. Hundreds. The same age as Abigail - thousands.”

“Photographs aren’t remembering.”

“No,” he said. “Beverley – I believe, truly, if he were dead – if they had killed him – they wouldn’t conceal it. It isn’t Chorley’s way, and I don’t believe it would be Lesley’s. They would…we would know.”

“There’s a lot of things you can do to people that aren’t killing them,” Beverley said, and tried not to think about the things Peter had talked around the edges of, the things Chorley had done.

“They wouldn’t hide that either. It’s about power.”

“Lesley doesn’t care about us.” Beverley folded her arms and looked away. “She cares about Peter. Or about having Peter care about her, anyway. I think she thinks it’s the same thing. She’d hurt him just for him.” She stared at the Xbox, gathering a thin layer of dust. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to touch it. “I _will_ kill her, you know. If.”

“I know,” Nightingale said. He was silent for long enough she thought he’d finished speaking, before he said “I wouldn’t stop you.”

“You couldn’t,” Beverley pointed out, ritually, ridiculously. You couldn’t let wizards think they could control you, her mother said. You couldn’t let them forget who you were.

“Nevertheless.” Nightingale had his head bowed; she couldn’t see his face. “If it matters.”

“I think it does,” Beverley said, and they watched the light through the window dim. Beverley wondered if Peter was somewhere he could see that. There were songs about it, she thought, the person you loved seeing the same light as you did. Peter's dad could probably name a hundred. 

Right now she couldn’t remember any of them.

*

The eighth day she went over to Peter’s parents’ flat, and Mama Grant pulled out all the old photographs of Peter as a child. Beverley looked at them and thought about what Nightingale had said the night before, and then about how this felt like a funeral, or the time after the church part of a funeral, when you sat with the family.

“When you have children,” Mama Grant said, “do you think they’ll look more like Peter, or you?”

“In my family, we all look like my mother,” Beverley said, her mouth dry.

Mama Grant kissed her teeth. “Well, she is the _orisa_ of the Thames, perhaps it’s to be expected.”

"They'll look like me, of course," said Peter's father, and his mother laughed. It almost sounded real. 

Beverley was starting to get cramps, which she almost never did, but she didn’t ask Mama Grant for painkillers; she didn’t want to have to tell her why.

That evening, she was just taking two Panadol Molly had given her when someone came bounding up the spiral staircase to the tech cave. Before Beverley could hope and hurt herself, Nightingale banged in the door still pulling his coat on.

“I wanted you to know before I left,” he began, and Beverley stood bolt upright, dropping her cup of water and letting it splash on the floor. He paused, one arm of the coat still off.

“It’s good news!” he said, hastily, but she hadn’t needed him to say it; his eyes were bright with hope and it hurt and she couldn’t look away. “Sahra got a call – he escaped.”

Beverley sucked in a breath. There wasn’t any air. Her words tangled. “Is he, how is he, did he have to – where is he?”

“Brixton,” Nightingale didn’t seem to be able to talk properly right now either. “He’s – he says he’s fine, there’s a witness we need to take in, he – he’s _alive_ , Beverley.”

Beverley closed her eyes for a second; it was too much. “I’m coming with you, then.”

He opened his mouth, then shook his head and grimaced. “We’ll need to set up a perimeter, and – perhaps best not. It’s a full police operation. I’m sorry.”

“Well, _go_ , then.” She swallowed her argument, knowing he would have said yes if he could have, because he wasn't an unkind man. She went up to him and finished pulling his coat on, since he’d stopped halfway. “Go, get him, _go_.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, on a breath that might have been a laugh, and because today was apparently a day for miracles Beverley kissed him on the cheek and pushed him out the door. The iron stairs sang out as he ran back down them, and she could still feel the movement of his cheek as he'd smiled, when she'd kissed him. She closed her eyes again against the dangerous onrush of joy. 

Beverley sat cross-legged on the floor, sweeping the spilt water out of the carpet and back into the cup with a gesture, and waited, and waited, and called Peter’s parents, and then Ty so Ty could call everybody else, and then realised Peter might – Peter would call her as soon as he could, of course – and didn’t call anybody else. She put her phone on the floor in front of her, and tried not to hope too much.

The Nightingale wouldn't have said he was alive if he wasn't. 

Finally, when her legs had got a cramp and she’d stood up and shaken it out and started walking across the courtyard to bother Molly for a cup of tea, just for something to do, her phone rang. She ran so fast she was at the door before she’d managed to answer it.

“Where _are_ you?” she demanded, and Peter’s voice, when he answered, seemed like the only thing she’d ever wanted to hear.   

**Author's Note:**

> Peter may have been too far gone in Lies Sleeping to narrate the emotional hurt/comfort we all deserved after that book, but BY CRIKEY WE SHALL HAVE IT IN FANFIC.


End file.
